Squeeze more speed out of your wordpress blog!

Page speed is all the rage right now. And although wordpress is a fast blogging platform, it can get really bloated, really quick. With all the free plugins and themes using a lot of requests. Here are some tips to get a faster loading wordpress blog.

First Grab yourself some tools to measure the speed

Get yourself some tools to test your speed.
Yahoo’s Yslow, Firebug firefox extension, google pagespeed are just some of the speed tools out there. Try them out to see which one you like.

Backup everything!

Make yourself a backup of all your WordPress files and you database. Just to be save 🙂

And lets get on with it.

Cut down on javascript files and minify the javascript and css files

Every request you send out will take time. And having a lot of Javascripts files is a real killer.

Put your javascripts after your CSS files

CSS files can load at the same time, javascript can’t. so put your CSS files before your js files. This will save a bit of time, but it will also give the illusion of a fast loading site as your elements will be styled earlier.

Compress your images to the right format and the right size

Getting your images down to the right size and getting them properly compressed isn’t as hard as you might think. Use photoshop if you have it or try something like SmushIt. And If you are using photoshop you can read about compression and save for web here.

Optimize your SQL database

Go into your phpMyAdmin, Select all tables, click repair and then click optimize. This can work wonders and takes very little work. You can even get and extension for it here from Yoast.

Leverage GZip if you have access to your servers

GZip will compress your content before sending it to your users. It is a bit technical and you will need some server knowhow to do it.

Save on http requests with CSS sprites

Try putting your graphics in a sprite image to save http requests, It helps a lot on graphic heavy sites. Here’s a in-depth explanation on how to use CSS sprites.

Hardcoding your wordpress header, sidebar and footer to cut down on the php calls

Hardcode as many of the php calls in your theme as you can. It’ll cut your loadtime in half if you have a lot of them. Thanks to Justin Parks for the tip.

Cache your pages

Caching your pages will make a static copy of your pages on your server which will load faster than a normal wordpress page. There are some good wordpress extensions for this. The most popular are WP-Cache or WP-Super-Cache.

Analytics code

Watch how long your analytics code takes to load, it can be a killer. If you are using google analytics, switch to the new asynchronous tracking code. Read about it here. It can save a small amount of loading.